buggery | Ranty McRantypants, aka Jack

(N.B. I'm not dead or incapacitated, I've just been busy.)

So the guest on tonight's The Daily Show was Christina Hoff Sommers, co-author (with Dr Sally Satel) of the new book One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance. The premise of this book is that, as a nation, we're doing kids a disservice by trying to encourage cooperation over competition and eliminating policies that enable bullying of schoolchildren by their peers. Sommers talked about how high self-esteem is actually bad, because sociopaths and murderers have high self-esteem, and conveniently left out the rather less-ridiculous fact that low self-esteem leads to eating disorders and suicide in children. She's also convinced that there's nothing wrong with traditional bully-friendly schoolyard activities like dodgeball*, and that school systems that ban dodgeball (rather than making it compulsory, which is what happens when it's allowed -- how many kids have you ever heard of organising a pick-up game of dodgeball where everybody actually wants to play and nobody who enjoys the game feels that it's diminished by the absence of hapless victims ordered into the circle by authority figures?) are going way overboard. Listening this woman made me want to get a bunch of people together to go to one of her book signings and throw dodgeballs at her as hard as we can.

Other things making my pants ranty of late:

Management companies running buildings set up as subsidised housing for disabled people discriminating against "younger" disabled adults (i.e. under fifty years of age) and lying about it (oh, the government program that provides the subsidies told us we can't have any more people under 50 in that building, so sorry, it's just out of our hands). Like it's not bad enough that half the programs that help the elderly don't provide services to younger people who are disabled and there aren't equivalent programs to provide the same services for the younger population. Yeah, we need people who agreed to provide services to us refusing to do so. And LYING ABOUT IT. Because people with disabilities, it's not like we need any extra help just to do things other people take for granted, right? And this is HOUSING. There's an actual shortage of subsidized housing available for disabled adults who are younger than retirement age. (I could do an entire rant just about the shortage.) 98% of us can't actually just get a nice high-paying job so we can pay a higher rent, and 98% of us don't have enough income coming in to allow us to afford ANY non-subsidised housing. So we're supposed to, what? Live on the street? Live with abusive family members? Get our doctors to have us admitted to nursing homes so we can be abused there? Get together with other people living on disability to pool resources so that 4 or 5 of us can afford one apartment, only to find out that doing so leads to us being denied many of the necessary services we'd otherwise be eligible for, on the theory that 'Oh, you're living with someone else, they can do those things for you.' 'Um, no, they're disabled too, and they need the same services.' 'Sorry, those are the rules!'

...On the bright side, this kind of discrimination in subsidised housing is in fact illegal, and the state office which handles complaints like this is investigating the situation in question and assures me that the management company will most likely be forced to cut it out. And I only had to call three different government agencies which ought to have at least been able to point me in the right direction (but didn't) before stumbling onto the "right" office almost by accident.

Also: The comics title formerly known as ROBIN, currently known as Unreadable Garbage. HOW LONG IS IT GOING TO TAKE TO GET THAT FUCKTARD OFF THIS BOOK?

Also: Weather. Two solid weeks of winter temperatures and/or high winds and/or heavy rains at the end of March/beginning of APRIL. Jack's body functions even more poorly than usual in weather like this, thank you so much, weather, have you talked to a CALENDAR lately? It is SPRING. Last week's one nice day of 80+F (25+C) weather was wonderful, thank you, being able to go outside without multiple layers of clothing and outerwear was a pleasure I had nearly forgotten, and that one nice day of 60+F (15+C) this week was also lovely before the mercury dropped and the skies opened up again. I really prefer to save my maximum painkiller-cocktail dosage for WINTER, when I expect to NEED it, when I expect winter weather. (*Winter weather. That is actually not meant to be an oxymoronic term, ok?)

Also: The Hallmark Channel. This cable network is currently airing reruns of Judging Amy, a really good (if non-fannish, though lots of actors better-known in fandom for other shows turn up here in recurring roles) drama which originally aired on (sarcasm alert!) that bastion of pushing the sexual/violent-content envelope, CBS. Hallmark Channel airs the JA reruns at 9 and 10pm on school nights with a 'parental discretion advised' warning. TNT network, incidentally, is also currently airing reruns of Judging Amy. TNT airs them at noon and 1pm weekdays. (The current CBS timeslot is 10pm Tuesdays.) TNT does not preface every episode with a content warning. The other difference, which becomes obvious if you watch reruns on both channels (Hallmark is -- a couple of weeks? Some number of episodes, anyway -- ahead of TNT) is that Hallmark Channel is editing the show for content. Even though they're showing it fairly late at night. Even though they put a warning on it... that refers to content in the episodes that they're CUTTING from the tapes. There's no little warning that the show has been edited from its original version for content. I'm not exactly a big Hallmark Channel viewer anyway, but discovering that they would so pointlessly and deviously abridge a show which in no way NEEDS to be so abridged makes me damned leery of watching anything else on that network.

Also: Healthcare coverage for the disabled. We don't get insurance at work, because, oh yeah, we're not well enough TO work. We couldn't buy private coverage even if we could afford to, because, SHOCK, for-profit insurance companies don't want to pay even a percentage of the costs for anybody who needs more than one or two routine checkups and maybe one or two prescriptions a year. So what do we get? Federally-administered Medicare (which many disabled people aren't even eligible for) and state-administered Medicaid (which the states work hard to keep people off of as a cost-saving measure, or saddle with $3000 deductibles -- I WISH that was a typo, believe me, three thousand dollar annual deductible for people with incomes barely over $10,000 per year in some states). Sounds great... until you try going to a doctor or dentist. Both programs offer reimbursement rates well below even the ever-decreasing amounts authorised by HMOs and other private carriers, so many doctors don't participate with one or the other, or both.

Predictably, this results in the best care, which is what people with the most serious problems need, not being available to people on disability. Oh, sure, we could go to a doctor who doesn't participate with either Medicare or Medicaid, but the "out-of-network" coverage is ZERO -- neither program will pay non-participating doctors directly, and they won't reimburse patients' out-of-pocket expense either, even for the amount that would be covered. Then, when we DO find a doctor who will take the only insurance available to us, we frequently have to wait a month or more for an appointment... only to find, all too often, that the quality of care is so substandard as to be worthless. And this doesn't exclude emergency situations. 'Part of my tooth broke off and the root is exposed.' 'The doctor can't see you until a week from tomorrow.' 'Uh... by then there's a good chance the tooth will have become infected and I'd need a root canal or extraction.' 'Oh, for an extraction you'd have to wait three weeks, and we don't do root canals here.' Alternately: 'Hi, I'm having a crisis, and I need to talk to my psychiatrist as soon as possible.' 'I'm sorry, that doctor is only available to clinic patients on Mondays, and doesn't take your insurance at the private-practice office. Be sure to pick a nice tall bridge now!' And if you think substandard care is better than none... Would you want to go to a doctor who prescribed thalidomide for your morning sickness, and insisted, when you pointed out that course of treatment was contraindicated by your condition, that your nausea was caused by something else and that physical examination didn't conclusively show you were pregnant -- even if you had your pregnancy test lab results in your hand? That's equivalent to what doctors I've seen in the past on Medicare or Medicaid have said to me, though the details of diagnosis and treatment are different; I picked on thalidomide on the theory that most people would know what was wrong with the proposed treatment without needing to go google.

If it were up to me? Any doctor who wanted to practice medicine in my state would be REQUIRED to participate in both Medicare and Medicaid. They make lawyers do pro bono, and those lawyers typically don't get any reimbursement at all for those cases. It makes no sense for people with crippling neurological complaints not to be able to see a neurologist, or people with crippling mental health problems not to be able to see a psychiatrist, or people with crippling metabolic dysfunction not to be able to see an endocrinologist, just because the doctors all want more money than Medicare or Medicaid are able to provide. I have sympathy for the predicament that privatised health insurance complications and malpractice insurance costs have put doctors in, but if they're not going to put patients' need for care first, maybe they should be in a different line of work anyway.

*I have no issues with adults choosing to play dodgeball recreationally. Or, okay, I have issues with it, but they're my issues -- I'm not going to say that grownups can't or shouldn't get involved in their local dodgeball league if that's something they enjoy. But coercing kids who may or may not want to participate in a 'sport' where the OBJECT is to HIT other kids, in a school setting, is as horribly inappropriate as having a boxing tournament as part of a mandatory physical education curriculum for ten-year-olds.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled comics squee. Please stand by.

edited to add cut tags, because I, uh, kinda went off on some rants there...